Pen Testing
Content
Pen testing Test Scenarios for Functionality: 1) Verify “type of Pen” (Ball Point or Ink or Felt tip) etc., Let‟s assume it‟s Ball Point pen as further scenarios will change based on the Pen type. 2) 3) 4) 5) 6) 7) 8) Test Pen colour is as per specification Test if the ink colour is as per specification. Test ink impression/colour on paper remains consistent from start till ink in the refill gets over. Test Dimensions of the Pen, Size length and Shape of the Pen meets the requirements. Test if pen writes smoothly and continuously without breaks or blots on the paper. Test if ink on paper dries quickly as per requirement (assume less than 1 second as per requirement) Test if the thickness of the line drawn by the pen tip is as per specification. (0.4 mm etc.,)
9) Keep ballpoint of the pen in contact with paper for considerable amount of time and check if the ink blots. 10) Write on different type of paper (smooth, rough, card boards etc.,) and confirm pen writes correctly on all types of papers. 11) Check if the pen cap has a gripper, so that user can plug the pen to shirt pocket firmly. 12) Test if ink is waterproof. Write on paper, dip paper in water and check if writing/ink has faded or smudged. 13) Verify that the ink used does not have bad odor because of the chemicals used in the ink. 14) Check weight of the pen is as per requirements. 15) Test pen can be used for writing with various angles like straight, slant etc.. Different writing angle should not impact the quality of the impression made on the paper nor should the pen tip be damaged.
Performance test scenarios: 1) Test if Pen works in extreme temperatures like less than 0 degrees and at higher temperatures like 60 etc., 2) Test if pen works in higher and lower altitudes i.e. in different gravity.
3) Test if pen works with lower and higher atmospheric pressures. Ink may not flow evenly in lower or higher atmospheric pressures. 4) Test if the pen functions if it is used for writing continuously for longer duration (say for 10 hours).
5) Keep scribbling on paper vigorously and continuously for several minutes to check friction on the ball does not damage the pen tip.
6) Test how much can be written using 1 complete refill. Measure the distance it can write and compare it with specification. 7) Test if ink dries up if pen is kept open (without cap) for longer duration.
8) Dip pen in water for considerable amount of time, take it out, dry it out in open air and write. Verify pen still writes without any issues. Load test scenarios: 1) Drop the pen from reasonable height say about 5 to 6 feet multiple times with different angles like Pen tip hitting the floor dead on and pen falling flat on ground etc., Verify pen is not broken and pen still writes without issues. 2) Press the pen hard on to surface while writing, check if pen still writes and Pen tip or pen itself does not break. 3) Drop pen on the ground, stamp it to test if it can bear reasonable external weight (e.g.: up to 100 Kgs). Verify pen is not broken and still writes as expected. Compatibility Test Scenarios: 1) Write on different types materials like leather, cloth, plastic sheet, and rubber etc., Verify ink dries quickly. 2) Test compatibility of refills of same and other brands.
Installation and Un-installation Test Scenarios: 1) Disassemble and assemble pen. Remove cap, remove refill etc., and put it back. Test if the pen writes as expected. 2) Change Refill and Test if the pen writes as expected.
Usability Test Scenarios: 1) Test if Pen is usable across age (Children to aged) and by different Professionals like Lawyers, Doctors, and Businessmen etc. can write comfortably with the pen. 2) Check with different audience if the colour and dimension of the Pen is acceptable for their usage or profession. 3) 4) Test if ink leaks from refill when pen is kept upside down for longer duration. Test materials used in pen is recyclable.
5) Test to see if there are smaller parts in the pen that people can accidentally swallow, especially children have tendency to stick rear end of the pen in their mouth while thinking and some people have the habit of chewing pen as they think. 6) Test external material of the pen is made of non-toxic material.
What is Cookie? Cookie is small information stored in text file on user‟s hard drive by web server. This information is later used by web browser to retrieve information from that machine. Generally cookie contains personalized user data or information that is used to communicate between different web pages. Why Cookies are used? Cookies are nothing but the user‟s identity and used to track where the user navigated throughout the web site pages. The communication between web browser and web server is stateless.
For example if you are accessing domain http://www.example.com/1.html then web browser will simply query to example.com web server for the page 1.html. Next time if you type page as http://www.example.com/2.html then new request is send to example.com web server for sending 2.html page and web server don‟t know anything about to whom the previous page 1.html served. What if you want the previous history of this user communication with the web server? You need to maintain the user state and interaction between web browser and web server somewhere. This is where cookie comes into picture. Cookies serve the purpose of maintaining the user interactions with web server. How cookies work? The HTTP protocol used to exchange information files on the web is used to maintain the cookies. There are two types of HTTP protocol. Stateless HTTP and Stateful HTTP protocol. Stateless HTTP protocol does not keep any record of previously accessed web page history. While Stateful HTTP protocol do keep some history of previous web browser and web server interactions and this protocol is used by cookies to maintain the user interactions. Whenever user visits the site or page that is using cookie, small code inside that HTML page (Generally a call to some language script to write the cookie like cookies in JAVAScript, PHP, Perl) writes a text file on users machine called cookie. Here is one example of the code that is used to write cookie and can be placed inside any HTML page:
Set-Cookie: NAME=VALUE; expires=DATE; path=PATH; domain=DOMAIN_NAME;
When user visits the same page or domain later time this cookie is read from disk and used to identify the second visit of the same user on that domain. Expiration time is set while writing the cookie. This time is decided by the application that is going to use the cookie.
Generally two types of cookies are written on user machine.
1) Session cookies: This cookie is active till the browser that invoked the cookie is open. When we close the browser this session cookie gets deleted. Some time session of say 20 minutes can be set to expire the cookie. 2) Persistent cookies: The cookies that are written permanently on user machine and lasts for months or years. Where cookies are stored? When any web page application writes cookie it get saved in a text file on user hard disk drive. The path where the cookies get stored depends on the browser. Different browsers store cookie in different paths. E.g. Internet explorer store cookies on path “C:\Documents and Settings\Default User\Cookies” Here the “Default User” can be replaced by the current user you logged in as. Like “Administrator”, or user name like “Vijay” etc. The cookie path can be easily found by navigating through the browser options. In Mozilla Firefox browser you can even see the cookies in browser options itself. Open the Mozila browser, click on Tools>Options->Privacy and then “Show cookies” button. How cookies are stored? Lets take example of cookie written by rediff.com on Mozilla Firefox browser: On Mozilla Firefox browser when you open the page rediff.com or login to your rediffmail account, a cookie will get written on your Hard disk. To view this cookie simply click on “Show cookies” button mentioned on above path. Click on Rediff.com site under this cookie list. You can see different cookies written by rediff domain with different names. Site: Rediff.com Cookie name: RMID Name: RMID (Name of the cookie) Content: 1d11c8ec44bf49e0… (Encrypted content) Domain: .rediff.com Path: / (Any path after the domain name) Send For: Any type of connection Expires: Thursday, December 31, 2020 11:59:59 PM Applications where cookies can be used: 1) To implement shopping cart: Cookies are used for maintaining online ordering system. Cookies remember what user wants to buy. What if user adds some products in their shopping cart and if due to some reason user don‟t want to buy those products this time and closes the browser window? When next time same user visits the purchase page he can see all the products he added in shopping cart in his last visit. 2) Personalized sites:
When user visits certain pages they are asked which pages they don‟t want to visit or display. User options are get stored in cookie and till the user is online, those pages are not shown to him. 3) User tracking: To track number of unique visitors online at particular time.
4) Marketing: Some companies use cookies to display advertisements on user machines. Cookies control these advertisements. When and which advertisement should be shown? What is the interest of the user? Which keywords he searches on the site? All these things can be maintained using cookies.
5) User sessions: Cookies can track user sessions to particular domain using user ID and password.
Drawbacks of cookies:
1) Even writing Cookie is a great way to maintain user interaction, if user has set browser options to warn before writing any cookie or disabled the cookies completely then site containing cookie will be completely disabled and can not perform any operation resulting in loss of site traffic.
2) Too many Cookies: If you are writing too many cookies on every page navigation and if user has turned on option to warn before writing cookie, this could turn away user from your site.
3) Security issues: Some times users personal information is stored in cookies and if someone hack the cookie then hacker can get access to your personal information. Even corrupted cookies can be read by different domains and lead to security issues.
4) Sensitive information: Some sites may write and store your sensitive information in cookies, which should not be allowed due to privacy concerns.
This should be enough to know what cookies are. If you want more cookie info see Cookie Central page.
Some Major Test cases for web application cookie testing:
The first obvious test case is to test if your application is writing cookies properly on disk. You can use the Cookie Tester application also if you don‟t have any web application to test but you want to understand the cookie concept for testing.
Test cases:
1) As a Cookie privacy policy make sure from your design documents that no personal or sensitive data is stored in the cookie.
2) If you have no option than saving sensitive data in cookie make sure data stored in cookie is stored in encrypted format.
3) Make sure that there is no overuse of cookies on your site under test. Overuse of cookies will annoy users if browser is prompting for cookies more often and this could result in loss of site traffic and eventually loss of business.
4) Disable the cookies from your browser settings: If you are using cookies on your site, your sites major functionality will not work by disabling the cookies. Then try to access the web site under test. Navigate through the site. See if appropriate messages are displayed to user like “For smooth functioning of this site make sure that cookies are enabled on your browser”. There should not be any page crash due to disabling the cookies. (Please make sure that you close all browsers, delete all previously written cookies before performing this test)
5) Accepts/Reject some cookies: The best way to check web site functionality is, not to accept all cookies. If you are writing 10 cookies in your web application then randomly accept some cookies say accept 5 and reject 5 cookies. For executing this test case you can set browser options to prompt whenever cookie is being written to disk. On this prompt window you can either accept or reject cookie. Try to access major functionality of web site. See if pages are getting crashed or data is getting corrupted.
6) Delete cookie: Allow site to write the cookies and then close all browsers and manually delete all cookies for web site under test. Access the web pages and check the behavior of the pages.
7) Corrupt the cookies: Corrupting cookie is easy. You know where cookies are stored. Manually edit the cookie in notepad and change the parameters to some vague values. Like alter the cookie content, Name of the cookie or expiry date of the cookie and see the site functionality. In some cases corrupted cookies allow to read the data inside it for any other domain. This should not happen in case of your web site cookies. Note that the cookies written by one domain say rediff.com can‟t be accessed by other domain say yahoo.com unless and until the cookies are corrupted and someone trying to hack the cookie data.
8 ) Checking the deletion of cookies from your web application page: Some times cookie written by domain say rediff.com may be deleted by same domain but by different page under that domain. This is the general case if you are testing some „action tracking‟ web portal. Action tracking or purchase tracking pixel is placed on the action web page and when any action or purchase occurs by user the cookie written on disk get deleted to avoid multiple action logging from same cookie. Check if reaching to your action or purchase page deletes the cookie properly and no more invalid actions or purchase get logged from same user.
9) Cookie Testing on Multiple browsers: This is the important case to check if your web application page is writing the cookies properly on different browsers as intended and site works properly using these cookies. You can test your web application on Major used browsers like Internet explorer (Various versions), Mozilla Firefox, Netscape, Opera etc.
10) If your web application is using cookies to maintain the logging state of any user then log in to your web application using some username and password. In many cases you can see the logged in user ID parameter directly in browser address bar. Change this parameter to different value say if previous user ID is 100 then make it 101 and press enter. The proper access message should be displayed to user and user should not be able to see other users account.
9) Keep ballpoint of the pen in contact with paper for considerable amount of time and check if the ink blots. 10) Write on different type of paper (smooth, rough, card boards etc.,) and confirm pen writes correctly on all types of papers. 11) Check if the pen cap has a gripper, so that user can plug the pen to shirt pocket firmly. 12) Test if ink is waterproof. Write on paper, dip paper in water and check if writing/ink has faded or smudged. 13) Verify that the ink used does not have bad odor because of the chemicals used in the ink. 14) Check weight of the pen is as per requirements. 15) Test pen can be used for writing with various angles like straight, slant etc.. Different writing angle should not impact the quality of the impression made on the paper nor should the pen tip be damaged.
Performance test scenarios: 1) Test if Pen works in extreme temperatures like less than 0 degrees and at higher temperatures like 60 etc., 2) Test if pen works in higher and lower altitudes i.e. in different gravity.
3) Test if pen works with lower and higher atmospheric pressures. Ink may not flow evenly in lower or higher atmospheric pressures. 4) Test if the pen functions if it is used for writing continuously for longer duration (say for 10 hours).
5) Keep scribbling on paper vigorously and continuously for several minutes to check friction on the ball does not damage the pen tip.
6) Test how much can be written using 1 complete refill. Measure the distance it can write and compare it with specification. 7) Test if ink dries up if pen is kept open (without cap) for longer duration.
8) Dip pen in water for considerable amount of time, take it out, dry it out in open air and write. Verify pen still writes without any issues. Load test scenarios: 1) Drop the pen from reasonable height say about 5 to 6 feet multiple times with different angles like Pen tip hitting the floor dead on and pen falling flat on ground etc., Verify pen is not broken and pen still writes without issues. 2) Press the pen hard on to surface while writing, check if pen still writes and Pen tip or pen itself does not break. 3) Drop pen on the ground, stamp it to test if it can bear reasonable external weight (e.g.: up to 100 Kgs). Verify pen is not broken and still writes as expected. Compatibility Test Scenarios: 1) Write on different types materials like leather, cloth, plastic sheet, and rubber etc., Verify ink dries quickly. 2) Test compatibility of refills of same and other brands.
Installation and Un-installation Test Scenarios: 1) Disassemble and assemble pen. Remove cap, remove refill etc., and put it back. Test if the pen writes as expected. 2) Change Refill and Test if the pen writes as expected.
Usability Test Scenarios: 1) Test if Pen is usable across age (Children to aged) and by different Professionals like Lawyers, Doctors, and Businessmen etc. can write comfortably with the pen. 2) Check with different audience if the colour and dimension of the Pen is acceptable for their usage or profession. 3) 4) Test if ink leaks from refill when pen is kept upside down for longer duration. Test materials used in pen is recyclable.
5) Test to see if there are smaller parts in the pen that people can accidentally swallow, especially children have tendency to stick rear end of the pen in their mouth while thinking and some people have the habit of chewing pen as they think. 6) Test external material of the pen is made of non-toxic material.
What is Cookie? Cookie is small information stored in text file on user‟s hard drive by web server. This information is later used by web browser to retrieve information from that machine. Generally cookie contains personalized user data or information that is used to communicate between different web pages. Why Cookies are used? Cookies are nothing but the user‟s identity and used to track where the user navigated throughout the web site pages. The communication between web browser and web server is stateless.
For example if you are accessing domain http://www.example.com/1.html then web browser will simply query to example.com web server for the page 1.html. Next time if you type page as http://www.example.com/2.html then new request is send to example.com web server for sending 2.html page and web server don‟t know anything about to whom the previous page 1.html served. What if you want the previous history of this user communication with the web server? You need to maintain the user state and interaction between web browser and web server somewhere. This is where cookie comes into picture. Cookies serve the purpose of maintaining the user interactions with web server. How cookies work? The HTTP protocol used to exchange information files on the web is used to maintain the cookies. There are two types of HTTP protocol. Stateless HTTP and Stateful HTTP protocol. Stateless HTTP protocol does not keep any record of previously accessed web page history. While Stateful HTTP protocol do keep some history of previous web browser and web server interactions and this protocol is used by cookies to maintain the user interactions. Whenever user visits the site or page that is using cookie, small code inside that HTML page (Generally a call to some language script to write the cookie like cookies in JAVAScript, PHP, Perl) writes a text file on users machine called cookie. Here is one example of the code that is used to write cookie and can be placed inside any HTML page:
Set-Cookie: NAME=VALUE; expires=DATE; path=PATH; domain=DOMAIN_NAME;
When user visits the same page or domain later time this cookie is read from disk and used to identify the second visit of the same user on that domain. Expiration time is set while writing the cookie. This time is decided by the application that is going to use the cookie.
Generally two types of cookies are written on user machine.
1) Session cookies: This cookie is active till the browser that invoked the cookie is open. When we close the browser this session cookie gets deleted. Some time session of say 20 minutes can be set to expire the cookie. 2) Persistent cookies: The cookies that are written permanently on user machine and lasts for months or years. Where cookies are stored? When any web page application writes cookie it get saved in a text file on user hard disk drive. The path where the cookies get stored depends on the browser. Different browsers store cookie in different paths. E.g. Internet explorer store cookies on path “C:\Documents and Settings\Default User\Cookies” Here the “Default User” can be replaced by the current user you logged in as. Like “Administrator”, or user name like “Vijay” etc. The cookie path can be easily found by navigating through the browser options. In Mozilla Firefox browser you can even see the cookies in browser options itself. Open the Mozila browser, click on Tools>Options->Privacy and then “Show cookies” button. How cookies are stored? Lets take example of cookie written by rediff.com on Mozilla Firefox browser: On Mozilla Firefox browser when you open the page rediff.com or login to your rediffmail account, a cookie will get written on your Hard disk. To view this cookie simply click on “Show cookies” button mentioned on above path. Click on Rediff.com site under this cookie list. You can see different cookies written by rediff domain with different names. Site: Rediff.com Cookie name: RMID Name: RMID (Name of the cookie) Content: 1d11c8ec44bf49e0… (Encrypted content) Domain: .rediff.com Path: / (Any path after the domain name) Send For: Any type of connection Expires: Thursday, December 31, 2020 11:59:59 PM Applications where cookies can be used: 1) To implement shopping cart: Cookies are used for maintaining online ordering system. Cookies remember what user wants to buy. What if user adds some products in their shopping cart and if due to some reason user don‟t want to buy those products this time and closes the browser window? When next time same user visits the purchase page he can see all the products he added in shopping cart in his last visit. 2) Personalized sites:
When user visits certain pages they are asked which pages they don‟t want to visit or display. User options are get stored in cookie and till the user is online, those pages are not shown to him. 3) User tracking: To track number of unique visitors online at particular time.
4) Marketing: Some companies use cookies to display advertisements on user machines. Cookies control these advertisements. When and which advertisement should be shown? What is the interest of the user? Which keywords he searches on the site? All these things can be maintained using cookies.
5) User sessions: Cookies can track user sessions to particular domain using user ID and password.
Drawbacks of cookies:
1) Even writing Cookie is a great way to maintain user interaction, if user has set browser options to warn before writing any cookie or disabled the cookies completely then site containing cookie will be completely disabled and can not perform any operation resulting in loss of site traffic.
2) Too many Cookies: If you are writing too many cookies on every page navigation and if user has turned on option to warn before writing cookie, this could turn away user from your site.
3) Security issues: Some times users personal information is stored in cookies and if someone hack the cookie then hacker can get access to your personal information. Even corrupted cookies can be read by different domains and lead to security issues.
4) Sensitive information: Some sites may write and store your sensitive information in cookies, which should not be allowed due to privacy concerns.
This should be enough to know what cookies are. If you want more cookie info see Cookie Central page.
Some Major Test cases for web application cookie testing:
The first obvious test case is to test if your application is writing cookies properly on disk. You can use the Cookie Tester application also if you don‟t have any web application to test but you want to understand the cookie concept for testing.
Test cases:
1) As a Cookie privacy policy make sure from your design documents that no personal or sensitive data is stored in the cookie.
2) If you have no option than saving sensitive data in cookie make sure data stored in cookie is stored in encrypted format.
3) Make sure that there is no overuse of cookies on your site under test. Overuse of cookies will annoy users if browser is prompting for cookies more often and this could result in loss of site traffic and eventually loss of business.
4) Disable the cookies from your browser settings: If you are using cookies on your site, your sites major functionality will not work by disabling the cookies. Then try to access the web site under test. Navigate through the site. See if appropriate messages are displayed to user like “For smooth functioning of this site make sure that cookies are enabled on your browser”. There should not be any page crash due to disabling the cookies. (Please make sure that you close all browsers, delete all previously written cookies before performing this test)
5) Accepts/Reject some cookies: The best way to check web site functionality is, not to accept all cookies. If you are writing 10 cookies in your web application then randomly accept some cookies say accept 5 and reject 5 cookies. For executing this test case you can set browser options to prompt whenever cookie is being written to disk. On this prompt window you can either accept or reject cookie. Try to access major functionality of web site. See if pages are getting crashed or data is getting corrupted.
6) Delete cookie: Allow site to write the cookies and then close all browsers and manually delete all cookies for web site under test. Access the web pages and check the behavior of the pages.
7) Corrupt the cookies: Corrupting cookie is easy. You know where cookies are stored. Manually edit the cookie in notepad and change the parameters to some vague values. Like alter the cookie content, Name of the cookie or expiry date of the cookie and see the site functionality. In some cases corrupted cookies allow to read the data inside it for any other domain. This should not happen in case of your web site cookies. Note that the cookies written by one domain say rediff.com can‟t be accessed by other domain say yahoo.com unless and until the cookies are corrupted and someone trying to hack the cookie data.
8 ) Checking the deletion of cookies from your web application page: Some times cookie written by domain say rediff.com may be deleted by same domain but by different page under that domain. This is the general case if you are testing some „action tracking‟ web portal. Action tracking or purchase tracking pixel is placed on the action web page and when any action or purchase occurs by user the cookie written on disk get deleted to avoid multiple action logging from same cookie. Check if reaching to your action or purchase page deletes the cookie properly and no more invalid actions or purchase get logged from same user.
9) Cookie Testing on Multiple browsers: This is the important case to check if your web application page is writing the cookies properly on different browsers as intended and site works properly using these cookies. You can test your web application on Major used browsers like Internet explorer (Various versions), Mozilla Firefox, Netscape, Opera etc.
10) If your web application is using cookies to maintain the logging state of any user then log in to your web application using some username and password. In many cases you can see the logged in user ID parameter directly in browser address bar. Change this parameter to different value say if previous user ID is 100 then make it 101 and press enter. The proper access message should be displayed to user and user should not be able to see other users account.
